I build a lot of web properties. And many have been in Divi. But after building a landing page in Divi that totally failed – I’m not using it again. Here’s the back story…

Saturday, I thought I’d whip out a landing page for a home water damage cleanup company that’s a client of mine. I figured because of the stackable nature of a good landing page, I’d use Divi and its famous Divi Page Builder. What I thought would take me an hour actually took nine hours. I was beat.

So, I checked my work, attached the landing pages to some Google Adwords advertisements and called it a day.

The next day, I showed a friend my work on a mobile phone. It looked like shit. The paralax pictures dropped out. The rest of the pictures were aligned weird and nothing seemed smooth or elegant with the landing page.

So, I spent 1/2 the day on Sunday trying to find out why and trying to find fixes without having to do a rebuild. No luck. I proceeded to rebuild everything with Kadence Virtue theme. It took about 2 hours and the results were so much better that it was staggering. Divi has a big name, but its crap.

I wish I had clipped some screenshots before I dumped Divi, but I did not see any reason to (at that time).

So, if you’re thinking about Divi theme – DON’T DO IT. Your time is too valuable. The picture in the post is a screen capture of my finished landing page. You can see it live at http://eccwaterdamage.com/water-damage.

Back Story: My client was looking for more phone calls for his Miami Hood Cleaning business. So we’ve been working to improve his ranks in the search engines and to get more incoming phone calls (the big goal). Things were going well but really, we needed more calls. So, we implemented what I call ‘the big green call button’. It’s a sticky button (stays on the screen all the time) and we programmed it to only show up on mobile devices. Our logic was that if it was a ‘click-to-call’ button, we only wanted it on devices that you could make calls from.

Coding was not to diffucult and we really liked the result (as far as the look & feel). Then two things happened:

Our quality score at Google Adwords went up and the cost of clicks dropped between 30% and 50%.

Our phone calls went up by 40%.!!!!!

This was HUGE for us. All of a sudden Google Adwords became a bargain for us. Now we’re getting plenty of calls and our hood cleaning team is booked out further in advance than ever. All because of one green button!

How did we do it?

Our website for miamihoodcleaningpros.com is built in WordPress. So we needed a simple solution that we could launch on every page. To do that, we needed the description of the button to be coded in CSS, and the actual button to be coded in straight HTML. No Javascript, or anything like that.

First step was to find a way to code it so that the button would show up only on the mobile devices. That was simply a plugin called ‘mobile discover’.

Then we figured out the code to make an edge to edge button. Simple CSS with a statement of where it was to be placed and the height of the button, and the phone number that was to be dialed when the button was pushed.

That’s it. Then it was a matter of figuring how to code it into the pages. We used the plugin ‘openhook’ which gave us a simple way to inject the code for the button on everypage.

So What Happens When You Use Google URL Shortener to Reference a Google Doc? Okay – let me explain….

I know that Google likes to index sites that Google controls. They even index Google Docs. It also appears that they index Google URL Shortener pages. So, what if I took something like Reno Carpet Repair and I mentioned it with a backlink to an article about Reno Carpet Repair ? Would that help the sites ranking? OR what if I took it a step further and referenced the Google Document in a Google Shortener url like this: https://goo.gl/LGnwLs ?

So, the question becomes – would any of those methods actually A- get indexed & B- help with ranking?

Seems to me, it should work amazingly well. But time will tell. I am doing this on Sept 18,2017. I will come back here and report the results shortly.

Question:

“I want to do screencasts for businesses that need website improvements or have no website. Not going so well. Only talking to the business owner about 10% of the time. I made 25+ calls. 1. Ask for the business owner 2. Hi I’m Sally SEO Salesperson from xzy Marketing in xyz city. I’d like to send you a 5-minute video showing you 3 things you can do to improve your website. Would you be willing to watch if I sent that over to you? 3. Pass I think a lot of the times the business owner answers and they just say they aren’t the business owner. What am I doing wrong???”

Man! It can be so tough to get websites to rank in the search engines. Everyone seems to have some voodoo way to get things to rank and I have tried many. I’d say that I’ve tried them all – but theres just way too many to count at this point. My main goal is to get my Reno plumbers site to rank. But geez. It feels impossible some days. I have so many high powered backlinks and yet, it still seems stuck. (more…)

Remember the guy who wouldn’t take the flag pole down on his Virginia property a while back?
You might remember the news story several months ago about a crotchety old man in Virginia who defied his local Homeowners Association, and refused to take down the flag pole on his property along with the large American flag he flew on it.

Now we learn who that old man was. On June 15, 1919, Van T. Barfoot was born in Edinburg, Texas. That probably didn’t make news back then.

But twenty-five years later, on May 23, 1944, near Carano, Italy, that same Van T. Barfoot, who had in 1940 enlisted in the U.S. Army, set out alone to flank German machine gun positions from which gunfire was raining down on his fellow soldiers. His advance took him through a minefield but having done so, he proceeded to single-handedly take out three enemy machine gun positions, returning with 17 prisoners of war.

And if that weren’t enough for a day’s work, he later took on and destroyed three German tanks
sent to retake the machine gun positions.

That probably didn’t make much news either, given the scope of the war, but it did earn Van T. Barfoot, who retired as a Colonel after also serving in Korea and Vietnam, a well deserved Medal of Honor.

What did make news…Was his Neighborhood Association’s quibble with how the 90-year-old veteran chose to fly the American flag outside his suburban Virginia home. Seems the HOA rules said it was OK to fly a flag on a house-mounted bracket, but, for decorum, items such as Barfoot’s 21-foot flagpole were “unsuitable”.

Van Barfoot had been denied a permit for the pole, but erected it anyway and was facing court action unless he agreed to take it down.

Then the HOA story made national TV, and the Neighborhood Association rethought its position and agreed to indulge this aging hero who dwelt among them.

“In the time I have left”, he said to the Associated Press, “I plan to continue to fly the
American flag without interference.”

As well he should. And if any of his neighbors had taken a notion to contest him further, they might have done well to read his Medal of Honor citation first. Seems it indicates Mr. Van Barfoot wasn’t particularly good at backing down.

WE ONLY LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE! AND, BECAUSE OF OLD MEN LIKE VAN BARFOOT!

Now, let’s contrast this with you, Colin Kaepernick. Raised in a home of privilege, given a college education, and then given the opportunity to make millions of dollars for playing a fucking game.

And what do you do? You choose to purposely insult the likes of Van T. Barfoot with your disrespectful disregard of our country’s national anthem.

Our Constitution gives you the right to do what you want, but when you insult the greatest nation on Earth with your shallow protest, one thing comes to mind to me – Colin Kaepernick, you’re no Van T Barfoot. You have shamed yourself and your family with your antics. Go to hell Colin.

If you read that headline, you’re probably wondering ‘WTF does that mean?’. Well, Working on working is something that I think about all the time. You see, you can work on a project. You can work on your lawn. You can work on your attitude. But I think a lot of people need to ‘work on working’. In other words, just learn to work better all the time. Steven Pressfield has a great book that is available for free through Kindle or as a PDF from several locations, called “Do the Work” .

It’s an awesome book about simply getting the work done. I think the book is great and straight to the point. Definitely a great starting point for people to get off their asses and get shit done.

I think that those of us that don’t work with strict deadlines have it worse than those that have strict cutoffs forced on them by someone else or some conditions that require a deadline. In contrast to deadlines, as an independent entrepreneur, I don’t have anyone to corral me in and make me finish on time.

I saw a great TED video on the subject. Check this out….

You see what I mean. Procrastination is way worse without the ‘deadline monster’.

This week, I tried putting my own artificial deadlines on stuff. Monday, I felt like I should do 15 sales phone calls. I was getting ready to get on a flight from Las Vegas to Lake Tahoe and I thought, “I’m gonna make the boarding of the flight my deadline for those calls”.

So I grabbed my computer and my phone and started making the calls. My rule for myself was a minimum of fifteen calls in an hour and a half. I made calls relentlessly. About 8 calls in I was in touch with someone that was extremely interested in what I was offering and agreed to give me a trial run for my services at $25k per year. He gave me a verbal commitment. I got off the phone, documented it, and kept making calls. By boarding time, not only did I get the calls done, but I made $25,000 and had a backup offer from another guy. BOOM!

Then, unfortunately, I let shit slide for the next few days. Didn’t set a deadline for anything. Didn’t achieve anything notable through EOD Thursday. I actually started to get depressed about it. So Friday, I made a plan to start and finish developing a new website for a buddy of mine. He has a restaurant hood cleaning service in Las Vegas and needed a new website. So, I said to myself, “Okay JR. Time to get shit done. You’re going to create this site from scratch and have it 100% completed by Sunday.

I started working on http://lasvegashoodcleaning.com that night and went balls to the walls on Saturday. By 8pm Saturday night, the site was completely built and I submitted it to Google for indexing.

Lesson learned. Deadlines work. I imagine that real deadlines work better, but with the right motivation, why couldn’t self imposed deadlines be just as effective?